Don't get water in your eyes! is a single channel video that parodies synchronized swimming to engage in a discourse about positionality. All elements in the video are bodily; the audio is a sound created by a performer’s mouth, a technique readily taught on Youtube Tutorials. The text is appropriated from online guides in overcoming fear from swimming or entering water. The amateur performers (of multiple ethnicities) are taught choreography inspired by synchronized swimming, dry land exercises, and Pilates. The bodies allude to attempt to stay afloat as well as perform a relationship to each other. This video explores a more intimate investigation of the body’s movement in understanding its orientation and the space it inhabits. There is a recent urgency in addressing ideas on migration and mobility in regard to certain ethnic bodies. I am interested in exploring ways in which I can engage digital and performative tools to disorient and delay the viewer attempting to synthesis and mis-recognize the context, action, and especially the subject.

Body of Water, 2015, Single-channel video, 00:08:27

Body of Water is a single channel video piece that is an exploration on marking how the body attempts to move in water, land, and the digital realm. The materiality of the green screen paper (digital fabric) is enacted as the bodies shift; through these movements the surface continues to exist as well as the formation of an uncanny relationship to swimming. The size of the surface allows for close contact between the bodies of intergenerational relation. There are moments of touch between both subjects but the emphasis is to allow the artificial body of water to exist. The merging and delay of actual and imagined realities through references to stock footage readily available on Youtube against an recorded ‘immediacy’ of the amateur performers. This simple gesture grapples at the futile attempt towards social mobility and a yearning for fluidity in motion as if in water.